


I have seen you adored

by Timjan



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: /, Angst, But also, Complicated Relationships, Crooked Exchange, Crooked Exchange 2019, F/M, Infidelity, Near Infidelity, Non-Monogamy, Pining, Prompt Fill, Sex Pollen adjacent, Sharing a Bed, Soulmates, White House Era (Crooked Media RPF)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-12 05:13:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18439754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Timjan/pseuds/Timjan
Summary: In the bathroom, Tommy splashes ice cold water all over his burning face, sloshing his shirt. He loosens his wet tie as he slides down to the floor, leaning his head back against the cold tile on the wall. The room still feels like it’s spinning, though, and his heart is hammering in his chest, but Tommy tries to cut through the buzz to think logically about the situation: If Emily blushes more easily now, and her face has less ‘baby fat,’ and if Tommy’s hair has gotten blonder, and his eyes darker, that means… That means…





	1. Philomonal Entanglement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anatomical_heart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anatomical_heart/gifts).



> Thank you for giving me this opportunity to explore a trope I've never written before, anatomical_heart. I hope you enjoy the result!
> 
> The title comes from The Indelicates' _I Don't Care If It's True_ (I prefer the demo version from Songs for Swinging Lovers).
> 
> And as always, ~~this is brought to you by the Cash App~~ keep it secret, keep it safe.

Emily’s bare toes press into Tommy’s thigh in little teasing pokes. When Tommy glances away from the somehow-even-dumber sequel to the Sherlock Holmes movie they watched last weekend, he’s met by a cheeky grin from Emily’s corner of the sofa. The blueish light of the TV screen plays over her features in the dim light. It makes her look older than she usually does, her face a little slimmer, her bone structure a little more pronounced. Like she’s finally shed that ‘baby fat’ that Tommy overheard her complaining to Hanna about last weekend.

Emily jabs her toes into Tommy’s leg again, harder this time. On an impulse, Tommy snatches at one of her feet. He captures it, and with Emily’s ankle secure in his grip, Tommy throws her a mischievous glance, before sliding his fingers lightly from her heel to the ball of her foot. Emily shrieks in giggles, her mouth a hilariously perfect little ‘O’ of outrage, and tries to pull away, but Tommy tightens his grip around her ankle. Now it’s _his_ turn to grin cheekily, as he turns his face back up towards her and waggles his fingers in the air in an open threat to resume the tickling. Emily’s eyes meet his. Tommy’s fingers freeze in mid air. Some kind of intangible charge passes between them, Emily’s pupils blowing wide from one second to the next.

Instead of tickling her, Tommy’s fingers settle firmly on Emily’s ankle, and then they begin to travel further upwards, grazing the slim muscle of her calf, his thumb pressing in where her knee folds. A quiet little moan slips out between Emily’s parted lips. The noise somehow fills the whole room, even over the sound of the movie that’s still playing in the background, forgotten. Emily’s wide eyes still haven’t left Tommy’s hot face. The air feels thick.

The moment stretches out between them until it breaks, snapping Tommy back to himself. He glances away from Emily, lets go of her leg. Sits up a little straighter. Reminds himself that this is _Favs’ girlfriend_.

The weird thing is, that has never been hard to remember before. Tommy has been alone with Emily before, and it has never been like this. There has never been this… energy.

 _‘Liar,’_ a voice in Tommy’s head objects. _‘If she’d kept pushing last summer, do you really think you would have resisted her?’_

Tommy ignores the voice, tries to get his attention back on _Sherlock Holmes – A Game of Shadows_. He has no idea what’s going on – Robert Downey Jr is throwing a rooster at a man in a fur cap? – but he keeps his eyes on the TV, resisting the urge to glance over to see if Emily’s still looking at him.

It was supposed to be all four of them for this movie night at Emily’s place: Tommy, Jon, Emily, and Emily’s roommate, Hanna. Last weekend they watched the first Robert Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes movie all together, and today it’s time for the sequel. But then the campaign trip to New York that Favs was going on with POTUS was extended for an extra day, so they were already down one man when Hanna texted Emily that she was running super late, and that Tommy and Emily should start the movie without her. And now here they are. It’s ridiculous that they’re doing this at all without Favs, but Favs himself had insisted they go through with it, his fucking puppy-dog eyes earnest, entreating. Without any doubt that his girlfriend and his best friend could hang out without anything happening. As he should be able to be.

Tommy hopes that Hanna will show up soon. If she had been here, he could have played guilt-free footsie with her, like they did last Saturday, instead of whatever just happened with Emily. Well, that had not been _completely_ guilt-free either; Tommy can’t help thinking that Hanna’s too young for him, still, just like Tommy decided that Emily was too young when he first met _her_. It’s hard to hold fast to that principle when he sees how great Jon and Emily are with each other, though. It’s no secret that Jon and Emily are plotting to get Tommy and Hanna together, either, and up until today, Tommy would have said that it was working, that he could feel his defenses weakening. Hanna is great: smart and witty and stunningly pretty. But now, when Tommy shuts his eyes and tries to conjure up Hanna’s face, all he gets is Emily’s smile, her wide eyes from a moment ago. If he opened his eyes and turned his head, he could see her for real. If he reached out his hand, he could touch her, his hand shaking with the thought. He grabs it with his other hand, pushes his nails into his wrist.

Tommy’s breath burns in his chest like he’s been sprinting to catch a bus, and it’s a struggle to keep it steady. He swallows. Squeezes his eyes shut harder, swallows again. Breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth. When he breathes in again, he picks up on a faint scent that he’s never consciously noticed before but instantly knows as _Emily_. It seems to fill up the room, taunting him, makes him want to bury his face in Emily’s hair and breath her in like oxygen.

Tommy’s confused drifting is interrupted by the sudden sound of fucking _bagpipes_ , what the hell!? Tommy startles, and Emily giggles from over where she’s now sitting with her legs safely tucked beneath her. On the screen, Jude Law – sleeping in an old-timey car, for some reason? – looks just as startled and confused at what is happening as Tommy feels. Robert Downey Junior is, for equally unclear reasons, wearing a pair of ridiculous nineteenth century sunglasses. Tommy has completely lost track of the plot of this movie. Something about a number of seemingly unconnected crimes around the world? And Stephen Fry is involved? Right now, Law and Downey Jr are holding hands?

“What the hell is this movie even about?” Tommy blurts, unable to stop himself from glancing over at Emily.

“I have no idea,” she murmurs, voice pitched low, and then their eyes meet again.

Tommy’s the one to make a noise this time, a small gasp. He feels his cheeks grow warm, and hopes that the blue light of the TV neutralizes at least some of the hearty pink glow that he’s 100% sure is currently spreading across his features. He hopes, too, that Emily can’t feel the heat that he surely must be emanating, with how feverish he feels right now. He’s unable to look away from Emily, and as she blinks slowly a new wave of heat crashes over him. Tommy’s armpits prickle with sweat as he sits frozen, unable to move even as Emily begins to crawl the short distance of the sofa towards him. Red alerts are blinking in his head, blood rushing in his ears, but he just sits there as she settles down right next to him, rests her head on his stiff shoulder.

This shouldn’t be weird; Emily’s a cuddler. She’s touchy-feely with _everyone_. Tommy has seen her cuddle with Hanna, with Cody, with Ronan, with Nikki, with Shomik – back at a party in March Tommy even saw her curl up with the famously touch-averse Jonathan Ira Lovett. And Lovett tolerated it! Tommy himself has been on the receiving end of many Emily touches through the last year. She has pushed her cold feet under Tommy’s thighs, even as she’s sat with Favs’ arm around her, even as she’s nibbled at Favs’ earlobe. (Fuck, Tommy wants to nibble at _Emily’s_ earlobe.) She’s even rested her head on Tommy’s shoulder exactly like this before, drunk, in a taxi cab, squeezed in between Tommy and Favs, with Favs too busy on his phone to make a good pillow. That hadn’t been weird at all. It had felt natural. Good.

This feels good too, of course. Too good. Emily’s slight frame pressed against Tommy’s side, her scent overwhelming, now, with her this close, wrapping Tommy in a fog of sweet, fresh, human-y musk. It’s inescapable, like walking into a perfume shop. Or like sniffing a sharpie pen, with the way it’s going to Tommy’s head. Like smoking a joint.

On screen, Jude Law kisses that pretty red-haired actress who played that bitchy sister in Pride and Prejudice. She and Law are getting married. Robert Downey Jr glances away, jealous. Tommy shuts his eyes again, tilts his head back against the sofa as it fills with white noise, buzzing so hard Tommy feels like he should be vibrating with it. Another memory of bodily contact with Emily floats up into consciousness. Months ago, before Emily moved back to DC, she’d been here on a visit, and on the last night she, Jon and Tommy had shot the shit over a bottle of wine at Jon’s place. Somehow, they had ended up on one of Jon’s beige velour sofas, with Emily lying down with her head in Tommy’s lap, as Jon massaged her feet. It would only have taken such a small motion, then, for Emily to scoot up the slightest bit, turn her head a little, and her face would have been right at Tommy’s cock, with Jon still… with Jon still… _Fuck._ Remembering it now, with Emily this headswimmingly close, Tommy feels his cock grow hard in his jeans, his breathing even more shallow, even though he’d had no problem staying calm and unaroused back then.

Tommy’s so preoccupied with trying to will away his erection that he doesn’t even notice Emily’s head leaving his shoulder, doesn’t realize she has moved until he feels a tentative hand brush over his forehead, fingers cool against his burning skin. One of the fingers slide down, stroking Tommy’s left cheekbone, and Tommy’s opens his eyes, meets Emily’s hazel gaze, a worried crease between her eyebrows.

“You’re warm,” Emily says, her voice still pitched so low, lower than he’s heard it go before.

Tommy tries to hum, but the noise catches in his throat. He clears it, moves away from Emily the slightest bit. Her hand falls down into her lap as she leans away in a mirror move.

“You’re tense, too,” Emily says, her voice a little closer to her regular register. “How are you feeling, are you ill?”

Tommy opens his mouth but doesn’t know what to say. Surely, he can’t have been the only one caught up in whatever just happened? Surely, Emily must have felt it too? Tommy clears his throat again, looks away. Maybe he should just take the out, say that he’s not feeling so well, actually, and go home? If his head wasn’t full of cotton, it’d be easier to know what to do. If Emily’s scent wasn’t still filling him up, caressing his insides like the smoothest whiskey, it’d be easier to leave. Tommy shifts in his seat, trying to gather himself enough to make some sort of decision, when there’s a key in the apartment door.

“Honey, I’m home!” Hanna yells from the hallway.

Now it’s Emily’s turn to startle. She scrambles away from Tommy on the sofa, grabbing for the remote control so she can pause the movie that is somehow, through all this, still playing (the pause screen is a blackboard full of math-y scribbles that most likely are complete nonsense).

“Heey Hanns!” Emily yells back, getting up to hug her roommate hello; she _is_ touchy-feely – maybe the goings on of the last few minutes have just been normal Emily behavior, and Tommy is just suddenly a creep?

Tommy stays on the sofa, his dick uncomfortably hard in his pants and his left cheek burning, the phantom press of Emily’s touch still lingering. He shakes his head, trying to get a handle on the situation.

\---

The next morning, Tommy tries to think of nothing as he brushes his teeth. He’s had a night of unresolved dreams and long periods of lying awake, so he’s already spent a lot of time not thinking about the weirdness from last night, how it still hadn’t entirely gone away, even with Hanna as a buffer between him and Emily. How he’d been too distracted to follow the plot of the movie even as they started it over, purportedly for Hanna’s benefit. How every breath had still felt like filling his lungs with Emily, and how he suspects that Hanna noticed that something was up with him from the weird look she gave him when she shyly brushed her hand against his thigh, and he jolted like a startled horse. How he doesn’t know what, if anything, Emily is gonna tell Favs about what happened between them. _Fuck, Favs._

 _‘Think of nothing,’_ Tommy reminds himself, as he spits out some toothpaste. There’s blood mixed in with the foam, and when Tommy looks in the mirror, he sees that his gums are bleeding – he’s brushing too hard again. He also looks tired, grey circles beneath his eyes, but not _that_ much more tired than he usually does. But wait, he also looks –

“Hey, Cody,” he says, leaning out of the 1309 upstairs bathroom door. “Have you noticed me getting… blonder?”

Cody jogs back up the stairs he was descending and sticks his head in through the door to where Tommy is standing, leaning closer to the mirror, his toothbrush hanging forgotten from the corner of his mouth.

“Uuuh,” Cody says, skeptically pulling at a strand of Tommy’s maybe-too-light hair. “Well, it _is_ summer…”

“Yeah, dude, but this happened, like, overnight, and it wasn’t sunny out yesterday.”

“Maybe you’re going grey?” a voice comes from down the hall.

“Fuck you, O’Neill!”

\---

In an effort to avoid a newly-returned-to-DC Favs – and also Emily! – Tommy ducks out of any and all weekend plans, claiming that he has to do more prep for the upcoming G20 meeting than he had realized. And to make his lie a truth, Tommy actually spends the day going over documents and calling up an annoyed Ben Rhodes (who clearly hadn’t planned to spend his Saturday talking shop) to double check five different things that Tommy’s genuinely happy he didn’t miss. You can never be too prepared.

Two days later, Tommy is spending his sleepless nights off at a paradise hotel in Mexico. Here he can worry about potential acute global crises as he tosses and turns, instead of his own petty interpersonal crisis. And still, when Tommy actually manages to sleep, he’s haunted by Emily’s sweet smile and sparkling laugh, in dream after dream of stealing her away from Favs.

In the middle of the second summit night, Tommy startles awake from a version of Friday’s movie night that took a very different turn than the original. He feels dirty and overly hot even in his ideally air-conditioned hotel room, with Emily’s phantom scent lingering in the luxurious sheets. Tommy doesn’t think he’s ever dreamt in smells before. Is he going mad?

Tommy knows he won’t be able to fall asleep again, guilt and arousal rushing through him, so he gets up and starts pacing his room, like a tiger in a too-small enclosure. Soon he’s expanded to pacing the hotel corridors, nodding to multi-national security personnel as he passes them by, and before he knows it he’s outside in the Los Cabos heat, weaving his way in the semi-dark around palm trees and sun loungers. He ends up taking a ridiculous night-time swim in the fancy hotel pool, lap after lap until he’s exhausted enough to find his way back to his room in a fugue state and fall into bed practically already asleep, to dream about getting lost in hazel eyes and blonde hair.

Tommy is exhausted the next day, too, but he’s used to doing his duty while sleep deprived, and thankfully he’s unimportant enough that no one takes the time to notice if his eyes fall shut a few times as the chairman of the Financial Stability Board speaks. That doesn’t stop him from berating himself, telling himself to get his shit together, but at least it’s something.

\---

As soon as Air Force One touches down on homeland soil, the clock is already ticking for how long Tommy can avoid Favs. Luckily he gets an extended respite by spending his first morning back in meetings over at State. After the last meeting is done, Tommy avoids the White House for an hour or so longer still, by lunching with Ronan Farrow. They chat over sushi about Tommy’s takeaways from the G20 summit, Lovett’s LA exploits and _The Dictator’s Learning Curve_ , which Tommy has been reading on Ronan’s recommendation. Then, halfway through their lunch date, Ronan stops dead in the middle of a point about the difference between Cuba and Venezuela, narrows his eyes, and leans forward to stare Tommy right in the eye.

“What?” Tommy asks, suddenly self-conscious.

“Are you wearing colored contacts?” Ronan asks back.

“What?” Tommy says again, thrown completely off guard.

Now it’s Ronan’s turn to look self-conscious. “No, sorry, I just – I thought your eyes looked a little darker than they usually do. It must be a trick of the light,” he says, speaking a little too fast, like he’s embarrassed. “And, uh… I mean, I do sometimes. Wear colored lenses, that is – it makes the whole having-to-put-painful-little-pieces-of-plastic-in-your-eyes thing a little more fun, you know?”

“O… kay?”

“Anyway, how’s your summer? Gone to any fun non-G20 parties? Met any new people?”

So, that’s a weird pivot, and Tommy doesn’t pick up on what Ronan is fishing at. Ronan’s question simmers in the back of Tommy’s mind, though, as he makes his way back to the White House, but the front of his mind is more occupied by the imminence of coming face to face with his best friend for the first time since he got a hard-on over said best friend’s girlfriend.

Sure enough, Tommy’s only been back in his office for 37 minutes before Favs ambles in, bearing Starbucks coffee and peanut butter apples from the mess.

“Hiya, Tom! How was Mexico?”

Tommy gives some bland answer, hardly aware of what he’s saying. Favs is smiling and bringing him snacks, so presumably Emily _hasn’t_ given him reason to suspect that something is up. “How was DC?” he finishes, trying to deflect.

“Oh, same old, same old,” Jon replies, sticking his tongue out. “Penn Ave. all day, Georgetown all night. I managed to keep my shirt on, at least. And we missed you! Especially a certain young lady,” he finishes with a wink.

Tommy wants to sink through the floor. He knows that Favs means Hanna, he’s not an idiot, but that phrasing… He can feel his face start to burn in record time, and with record intensity.

Jon laughs at him. “You have the _worst_ poker face, man! That blush’s the worst I’ve ever seen. Except, actually – Emily blushed _almost_ as bad on Tuesday, when I… well, hrrm, nevermind. Anyway, it was really cute. And Lovett is _entirely_ correct to mock you guys for your ridiculous WASPiness.”

The direct reference to Emily obviously makes Tommy’s mortification even worse. He hides his hands in his pockets so Favs won’t see them shaking, but he can’t hide the blush in question – in fact, it deepens even further.

Tommy can’t help imagining Emily, red all over, laughing at herself and covering her face with her hands… but wait. On that first night when Tommy and Emily met, before she even met Jon, she and one of the other interns had teased Tommy for his blushing. Tommy had countered that Emily was just as pale as him, so she should blush just as easily. And she had said she didn’t. Had she been lying, then? ‘Cause she can hardly have gotten blushier since then, unless – oh.

Oh, _fuck_.

Tommy’s stomach churns, his vision flickering in and out at the edges.

“Bathroom,” he manages to croak out, already leaving the room, Jon’s worried eyes boring into his neck as he disappears out the doorway.

Tommy finds his way to the nearest single stall bathroom with a hand against the wall to steady him, to anchor him to reality. Emily is… _Emily_ is…

In the bathroom, Tommy splashes ice cold water all over his burning face, sloshing his shirt. He loosens his wet tie as he slides down to the floor, leaning his head back against the cold tile on the wall. The room still feels like it’s spinning, though, and his heart is hammering in his chest, but Tommy tries to cut through the buzz to think logically about the situation: If Emily blushes more easily now, and her face has less ‘baby fat,’ and if Tommy’s hair has gotten blonder, and his eyes darker, that means… That means…

_Emily is his soulmate._

The word seems to mock Tommy with its grandiose proclamation of eternal love, of ‘meant to be.’ And Tommy can’t be a 100% sure, doesn’t have all the facts, but he knows already. The thought settles in his brain – in his soul? – as a fact of his existence. He _knows_. He knows it so much that it rises in his throat, and he has to scramble across the floor tile to puke his sushi lunch into the toilet.

\---

Back home at 1309 – Tommy hates calling in sick (or in this case, leaving work early), but there’s no way he’s getting any more work done today – Tommy opens up Google on his private laptop, searches for “soulmates first signs.”

The first hits are for the Wikipedia page for Synergistic Covalents (“‘Soulmates’ redirects here”), a scientific paper with the title _Antecedent determinants of philomonal exposure and genetic expression between covaling and non-covaling individuals: a randomized controlled trial_ , and a WikiHow post called “How to Tell if Someone is Your Soulmate (with Pictures).”

Tommy starts off skimming the Wikipedia page, reading about how “Ever since Ketnick et al.[4] discovered that all human beings release a constant, low level stream of signaling molecules (later named “philomones”) into the air, the scientific community speculated that they might be correlated to the long-reported but at the time still anecdotal phenomenon colloquially known as ‘soulmates.’,” but his eyes soon start to glaze over. The article is super long, discussing soulmates from a million different perspectives (Neurological Aspects, Antiquity and the Roman Empire, and Proposed Treatments, to name a few). And all that shit is probably super interesting, but Tommy needs something more relevant to his current predicament than speculation about whether the famous 12th century lovers Héloïse and Abélard might have been synergistically bonded or not.

The scientific paper, unsurprisingly, is full of science jargon (“Two potential synergistic covalents can enter into a synergistic bond through philomonal entanglement, a process that consists of two distinct phases, the ‘incitement phase’ and the ‘bonding phase’…”) which is waaay too dense for Tommy to parse right now. So he decides to let himself be condescended to by WikiHow instead. The step-by-step guide has the utterly unhelpful first step “1. Don’t freak out,” and some truly ludicrous illustrations, but it also has some useful information in a basic enough language that someone who is currently “freaking out” can follow it.

Step 2 and 3 tells Tommy to “Think back to the first time you met the person you think might be your soulmate,” and “Examine your emotional reactions when you’re around your possible soulmate,” but he tables those things for now, and moves on to “4. Look for physical changes in yourself and your potential soulmate” instead. “During the initial stage of the bonding process, you and your soulmate will start looking more like each other. The first things you will probably notice is subtle changes in hair, eye and skin color,” it reads, corroborating Tommy’s hypothesis, and goes on to warn him that “A little further on, things like your lips or eyes might start to change shape, and later still even your bone structure might change. Some people have even reported growing taller!”

 _‘Well, I definitely don’t need to get any taller,’_ Tommy thinks, an absurd side thought like you get in a crisis, because brains are fucking weird. And it’s not like tiny little Emily _would_ cause Tommy to grow, anyway. ( _She_ might end up adding some inches to her height, though, if this goes on for long enough.)

Even though he’s already satisfied (if that’s the right word for having concluded an interpersonal catastrophe has indeed already begun to unfold) that his hunch is right – that Emily _is_ actually his soulmate, _fuckfuckfuck_ – Tommy, now on autopilot, moves on to step five, “Try spending some time apart from your possible soulmate and see how you react.” It reads “If you can’t find any physical changes, but you still think the person might be your soulmate, the two of you might have moved on to the second stage of the bonding process before any changes happened. This can happen if you start dating and/or having sex shortly after you meet your soulmate, because prolonged physical proximity and physical intimacy can intensify the chemical reactions. In the second stage, staying apart for long periods of time will cause headaches, vertigo, nausea, fever and other physical symptoms that can get so bad that you might require medical attention, unless you reunite with your soulmate. So try spending 3-7 days apart from the person you think might be your soulmate, and see if you get sick. (But be sure to be able to get back together as soon as possible if any symptoms do appear!)”

Tommy already knew about that, from last year’s absolute nightmare of Lovett and Ronan realizing that they were soulmates _after_ Lovett had already moved to LA. The image of Ronan, lying pale and weak in a hospital bed as Lovett flew back from LA with a nurse of his own with him on the plane, has been seared into Tommy’s mind. The memory brings along with it all the confusion and fear that Tommy had been feeling then, helpless and unable to help, feeding the confused panic he’s feeling now, sending rivulets up his throat until he has to rush to the bathroom again.

Dry heaving over the downstairs toilet, Tommy assesses his options. He’s on a timeline here; soon the changes – both his and Emily’s – will start getting obvious to other people (Ronan, admittedly more observant than most, has already noticed something!), So Tommy will need a plan. It’s _so_ tempting, though, right now, to _not_ deal with it. To just, like, avoid Emily forever. But of course that’s not tenable. Completely avoiding your best friend’s girlfriend won’t fly no matter what, especially not when she’s _also your friend_. He owes it to Emily, at the very least, to tell her what’s going on. But on the other hand, he really really really really really doesn’t want to. He _really_ doesn’t. He’d like to spend every moment of the rest of his life in Emily’s presence, sure, but _talk_ to her about it? No. He’d rather move to fucking Alaska and never see her _or anyone else he knows_ ever again. _Fuck!_ Why is this happening to him?

Why doesn’t Tommy get a shining love story like Lovett and Ronan’s, where the hospital visit is just a (admittedly horrific) snag on the way to the happily ever after, instead of the inevitable end point? Why do _they_ get the perfect soulmate, in that ‘literally made for each other’-way that goes way beyond molecular biology and into actual _soul_ -soul stuff? While Tommy gets an embarrassing fluke that’ll mess up his whole life?

 _‘Who said anything about a fluke?’_ the little annoying voice in Tommy’s head counters. _‘“Step 2. Think back to when you first met the person you think might be your soulmate,” why don’t you?_ You _were the one who put the brakes on what could have been, remember.’_

That’s enough of a shock to Tommy’s system to get him to stop trying to puke into the toilet, and instead sit down on it to scroll through his phone, back and back in his text chain with Emily to the first message she ever sent him.

“Hi, Tommy! This is Emily the intern – I got your number from Shomik. I had a lot of fun talking with you on saturday!! Maybe we can meet up some time and you can show me a few of those must visit dc spots you told me about? ;)”

Wow, Tommy had forgotten how brazenly she’d been angling for a date, so shortly after they met. But Emily is always brave. Her little winky face at the end of the text mocks him, now, tantalizing in its flirty promise, making Tommy’s heart beat faster months and months too late. Back in last summer, Tommy had been flattered, but also sober and rational and determined to shut that down ASAP. Emily was barely out of college and so he had intentionally sorted her into the “friend” pile rather than the “possible-girlfriend pile”. But there _had_ been a pull there. He remembers it clearly, now, (more than remembers – he’s feeling it once again, tugging and clawing just beneath his ribs) but had successfully repressed – and suppressed – it up until this point. _Good job, you noble idiot._

“Did you have an instant connection, talking for hours on end? Did you maybe even get physical (or did you at least want to)? Did you want to see them again immediately?” the WikiHow guide had asked Tommy, under the step “2. Think back to the first time you met the person you think might be your soulmate.” Check, check, check. And yet he had answered, “Yeah, sounds great! Did you talk to Shomik too? Let’s get a group together and go over to Roosevelt Island some day, it’s super cool.” A coward’s way out, willfully misunderstanding. Emily had answered back less enthusiastically but hiding her disappointment well. And then Tommy had let the text conversation fizzle out.

The next relevant text is from a, in hindsight, very significant weekend two weeks later. Tommy had been considerably less sober and rational that Saturday night, and when Emily sent, “Heeey Tom so which dc bars are good bars? We r 4 people out to have a good time!!!!!” he sent back, “Can you even legally drink? Just kidding! We’re actully out at clyde’s in georgetown right now. You guys could come here?”

And Emily _had_ come there, only to end up talking about unions with Favs all night, laughing and touching his arm, and at the end kissing his cheek goodnight and giving him her number. But before all that, she sent Tommy, “Sssshhh if you dont know you cant witness against me… also yay sounds fun! We willl be there!! ;)”

That fucking winky face, again. It’s even worse this time, because this one isn’t just tied to wistfulness, but to jealousy. Because Tommy had been jealous back then, for several weeks, of how instantly taken with each other she and Jon had been (once they’d made sure that the other wasn’t a Republican), how easily they fell into each other’s orbits.

Back then, he had thought that that was just the same old Katie bullshit, Tommy’s general inability to feel fully happy for his friends when they met someone new ever since his broken engagement. Like how he’d been unable to stop himself from resenting Lovett and Ronan when they fell into _their_ whirlwind fly-across-the-country soulmate romance around the same time. And Tommy only has _more_ reason to resent them for their perfect fucking bond, now that he’ll _never_ get that. Because _his_ soulmate – that fucking mockery of a word! – is a girl he can never have. Fuck soulmates. Fuck Ronan. And _fuck_ Lovett.

But speaking of Lovett… Tommy is spiraling, sitting on a bathroom floor, staring at a year-old smiley with tears in his eyes. He clearly needs to talk to someone about what’s going on, and sooner rather than later. Lovett is one of Tommy’s best friends. And he has gone through the soulmate process. _And_ he mostly works from home, which means he is pretty likely to be able to take a phone call from a freaked-out friend on the other side of the country at what for him is midday.

\---

“Hey Tommy,” Lovett’s voice comes through Tommy’s iPhone speaker, sounding a little cautious – probably because Tommy never makes any unplanned calls. “What’s up?”

“Hey, buddy.” Tommy didn’t want to chicken out, so he just called up Lovett without a plan, and now he doesn’t know how to proceed. “Uh, have you talked to Ronan today?” he improvises.

“No? Not yet – he hasn’t even left work yet. Have you? What’s this about?”

“Uh…” How best to put this? “We had lunch together today, and I think he figured something out about me before I figured it out myself.”

“Mmm, yeah, he does that,” Lovett says, and he sounds so adoringly dopey that Tommy wants to throw his phone out the window. “So, this thing he realized, what is it? Are you finally ready to accept that you’re bisexual?”

“What? No!”

Lovett sniggers on the other end of the line. “Sorry, bad joke.” Lovett clears his throat, puts on a more serious voice. “But really, what is it?”

Tommy can feel the silence stretch out for too long as he tries to come up with the perfect angle of attack. Finally, he settles on, “Can you keep a secret?”

“Uh,” Lovett hedges, clearly discombobulated for real by now. “Maybe? Are we talking super-forbidden pre-warning about nuclear war here, or…?”

“No, Lovett, it’s not… it’s something private! And people are gonna find out sooner or later probably. So you won’t have to, like, take it to your grave or anything, I just need to tell someone before telling everybody, work through it, especially before telling the people who it concerns, because it’s complicated, and…” Tommy can tell that he’s speaking too fast, that he’s losing the thread, but he can’t stop himself, doesn’t know where he’s going enough to even course correct.

“Okay, calm down. I can keep a secret,” Lovett cuts in, all serious, for once. It’s grounding, even from two thousand miles away.

Tommy swallows. “So, you know Emily…?” he says, starting over.

“No, who?” Lovett replies, voice heavy with sarcasm. “I don’t recall hearing Favs wax sugary poetic about any woman by that name for almost a full year now, or meeting her several times, one of them _in your home_. Who is this ‘Emily’ you’re talking about?”

“Well, uh,” Tommy stalls, “that’s good, that you’ve never heard of her. Especially that you don’t know that she’s Favs’ girlfriend.” Tommy steels himself. “Because it turns out – well, I suspect... er, I mean, I’m pretty sure… We’re soulmates. Me and Emily. I’m, like, 94% positive.”

“Oh, shit,” Lovett breathes. Then he doesn’t say anything more for a full minute. Tommy, who doesn’t know what to say either, sets his phone down, putting it on speaker, and stares at it until Lovett replies.

“So… what’s the plan?” Lovett asks at last, his voice oddly soft.

Tommy groans. “There is no plan. It’s just a fucked up situation and I only realized it _today_ and I have no idea what to do to stop everything from going totally to shit.”

 “Hey, now, let’s not exaggerate,” Lovett chides, his voice still so carefully soft.

Tommy snorts. No one exaggerates like Lovett.

“Okay,” Lovett goes on, when it becomes clear that he’ll get no reply out of Tommy other than the snort. “So, you’re 94% sure that Emily’s your Covalent. That’s, uh…”

“Just say ‘soulmate,’ dude,” Tommy says. He can feel his shoulders relax from just talking to someone.

Lovett gives an exaggerated sigh. “Ugh, I hate that word, it’s so, you know…”

“No?”

“Ugh. Melodramatic. Lovey-dovey. _Soulmates_. Ridiculous! It’s just biochemistry.”

“Well, biochemistry or not, it’s… whatever.” Tommy suddenly does not want to talk about his own problems, even though that’s the whole reason he called Lovett. “Er, how did you and Ronan figure your whole thing out?”

Lovett audibly hesitates for a second, probably considering whether or not to go with Tommy’s sort-of change of the subject. “Well, we were in very different circumstances, obviously. But, actually… there was something that helped a lot through all the mess, that might work for you too. There’s, um… there’s a hotline. For soulmate things. They’re… they’re pretty good. Helpful.”

Tommy is instantly curious about what Lovett might have been calling this hotline about. He and Ronan are a success story, but doing soulmate stuff long distance is probably no picnic, now that Tommy thinks about it. There’ll be no exchange of philomones with someone on the opposite coast, no matter _how_ many video games you play together online. Tommy realizes that he completely dropped the ball on what was going on with Ronan and Lovett once they were out of the life-threatening illness stage of their soulmate saga. An occupational hazard; it’s all too easy to pay more attention to a foreign policy-related catastrophe-in-the-making than to really keeping up with one’s friends. Tommy should try to do better.

Once Lovett wrings a promise to call the hotline out of Tommy, Tommy retaliates by having Lovett walk him through all the intricacies of his and Ronan’s love story. Every word helps Tommy relax more, even through the jealousy, and by the time they hang up, Tommy feels almost normal again. At least normal enough to get off the bathroom floor. Small victories.

\---

Tommy doesn’t call the hotline. On the night he talked to Lovett, he tells himself he needs to sleep on it. Then, the next day, he spends his spare time trying to write a script for what to say to the hotline person, but he gets nowhere, because just thinking about the subject makes him want to die. So, he postpones the hotline call to the weekend, and goes back on WikiHow again instead, this time for the article “How to Hide Your ‘Soulmate Makeover’.” Apparently, Tommy will be investing in a pair of colored lenses after all.

The rest of the work week passes in a daze. Tommy walks around the West Wing like a zombie, hoping against hope that none of the reporters he interacts with will notice that anything is up with him. Like a bleeding seal hoping the sharks won’t be able to smell the blood in the water.

Tommy hopes even harder that Favs won’t notice that Tommy’s constantly milliseconds from blurting ‘I-think-your-girlfriend-is-my-soulmate-I’m-so-sorry-fuck-fuck-fuck’ whenever they’re in the same room. To that effect he avoids his best friend as much as possible. Avoids most people, really, even Keenan and O’Neill at home.

Daydreams and counterfactuals about Emily keep popping into Tommy’s head at any and all inopportune moments. In the middle of a Sit Room meeting about the situation in Egypt, Tommy’s suddenly imagining a scenario where Emily agrees to Favs’ attempt at a first date, and actually goes on that boat ride with Tommy and the guys. With both Tommy and Emily in swim wear, skin warmed by the sun, close together in the cockpit, there would have been so much opportunity for the philomones to do their thing; maybe they would have realized, then, before Emily and Jon really became an item, before there were any real heartbreak on the line. That night, Tommy takes out his express delivered lenses, and then he takes an Ambien for dreamless sleep. He still wakes up with imaginary Parfum d’Emily in his nostrils.

When the weekend finally rolls around, Favs whisks Emily away to North Reading to have her meet his grandmother and show her the places of his childhood. Tommy had known this was on the calendar, but he hadn’t known how hard it would hit him, the two of them fortifying their relationship even further, becoming more of a unit; it forces Tommy to hide under the blankets, watching bad movies on his laptop about it.

\---

With a new week comes a new resolution from Tommy to do something about his… situation. But then Favs disappears into a deadline-fog, finishing up all the different versions of the remarks POTUS will have to make once the Supreme Court delivers its ruling on the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate. That gives Tommy a few more days of respite from Favs – whose senses are less shark-sharp than your garden variety reporter’s – noticing that something is up. So Tommy decides to use that extra time to do some more research, before calling the hotline. He’s definitely not procrastinating, it’s just best to be prepared.

Tommy traverses through pop sci-blogs, more WikiHows, clickbait-y Buzzfeed quizzes (Which of These Shoes is Your Sole-Mate? Take this quiz to find out!), sensationalist articles, and deeply cringeworthy subreddits. It’s fascinating how far science has come from when Tommy was in high school, when many people still believed that the whole soulmate thing was just a romantic myth, _or_ that it was a truly spiritual phenomenon that had nothing to do with genes and signal substances. He learns about the Chinese experiments with human DNA samples (that they can use in experimentation much more freely than American scientists) that prove that while all individuals have more than one Potential Synergistic Match, once the process gets underway, the sample won’t react with any other potential match. Once the noticeable physical changes have started happening, there’s probably no going back. You’ll stay Entangled until you die. There’s anecdotal evidence that if Tommy stays away from Emily from right this second and then for the next 38 years or so, and he then has the luck to run across another of his PPMs, then _maybe_ another reaction might get going. The Chinese scientists are skeptical, though.

Next, Tommy somehow finds himself going down the rabbit hole of EUE: Extended Un-bonded Exposure. It’s what happens when two Covalents stay in the first phase of the Entanglement process indefinitely without moving on to the true Bonding phase, _or_ they stop seeing each other entirely. In that situation the physical changes can go on for _years_ , until the Covalents look more like siblings than potential lovers – and there are photographs to prove it! So that’s the worst-case scenario, obviously.

It’s also at the bottom of the EUE rabbit hole that Tommy comes across the creepy subreddit “Involuntary EUE Sufferers,” populated mostly by men who are only “exposed” to the their potential Covalent in an “extended” manner because they refuse to leave them alone, even though the (almost always) women have made it _very_ clear that they’re _not interested_ , biochemistry be damned. What fucking creeps. One of the most frequent posters even freely admits to having had a restraining order filed against him after he began stalking the poor lesbian woman he had synergistically matched with in a vanishingly rare Mixed Orientation Match.

Then there’s the general, tabloidly sensationalist stuff, like the Daily Mail article about a man whose whole life was destroyed when his wife’s daughter hit puberty and they matched synergistically, which, _ew_. It manages to out-creep both the Reddit creeps and the opportunistic capitalists while also being utterly tragic, and Tommy can’t make himself read beyond the bold part at the beginning, but at least it gives him some much-needed perspective on his own situation. On the other hand, he can’t stop himself from reading every single word of the depressingly relevant “MY HUSBAND AND MY COUSIN ARE SOULMATES!” Turns out that the husband left the subject of the story for her cousin, with the result of a lot of broken relationship, and the entire extended family taking sides. All in all, not an encouraging example.

By Wednesday, Tommy is a veritable expert on soulmate/Covalent matters. The Supreme Court ruling on ACA is probably the only thing (except for a national security emergency) that could successfully pull Tommy out of this new preoccupation, so on Wednesday morning he finds himself on the edge of his seat with all the other communications people pressed into Dan Pfeiffer’s office, his eyes one pair of many locked on the TV screen. No one breathes as the news cuts from the anchors at their desk, to a field reporter outside the Supreme Court, holding a stack of papers. The Court, the reporter informs them (and millions of other Americans around the country hanging on every word), won’t uphold the individual mandate based on the Commerce Clause – someone behind Tommy gasps – _but_ it’s upheld based on the Taxing Clause. More gasps. Disbelieving looks bounce around the office through one prolonged moment of ‘What the hell is happening!?’ Then the whole West Wing explodes into wild cheering.

They won! They _won_! Fuck yeah healthcare!

Once things quiet down a bit, and Tommy can extricate himself from all the back-slapping, he goes looking for Favs. Jon hadn’t watched the news with the other comms folks – he probably watched with POTUS himself, the lucky bastard – and this is the kind of day that’s _way_ busier for him than it is for Tommy. Tommy even has time to sneak off to the mess to get Jon one of those peanut butter apples that he loves so much, and probably really needs right about now.

At last, Tommy finds Favs in Plouffe’s office – why? – with David Litt, the two of them frantically scribbling corrections on a printed out speech. Jon looks up as Tommy enters the room, and immediately rushes to throw his arms around him. They hug for a long, blissful moment of normal best-friendship. _Damn_ , Tommy has been missing this.

It can’t last, of course. Favs has to run, and as he disappears off towards the Oval with the speech flapping in his hand, he manages to make extra sure that reality will come crashing down on Tommy by shouting back, “Let’s go out to celebrate this weekend! You, me, Emily, maybe Hanna…?” Favs always has a way with words.

\---

Tommy looks at his reflection in the cab’s rearview mirror one last time before paying the driver. His eyes are the right shade of blue. His t-shirt is blue too. Katie always said that this shirt made Tommy’s eyes pop and look even bluer than they usually do, which is _very_ desirable right now; if Emily – or Favs, for that matter – notices that Tommy’s eye color has changed, he will have to move to Iceland and become a goose farmer. So his eyes need to ‘pop.’

Out on the curb, Tommy self-consciously checks his reflection one extra last-last time in the cab’s window before it drives away. Okay. _Okay_. Time to find Jon and Emily.

Tommy strolls across the footpath bridge to Theodore Roosevelt Island, trying to step at a measured, natural, super normal pace. Yes, he’s meeting Favs and Em on Roosevelt Island. And it was his own stupid idea.

_“I don’t wanna go out to some stuffy bar; it’s summer, we should be outside,” Tommy had told Favs, secretly aiming to avoid a scenario where he’s pressed  close to Emily at some tiny table, philomones running amok in the confined space._

_“Sure, dude,” Favs had said, easy, agreeable. Unsuspecting. “Let’s commune with nature. Where d’you wanna go?”_

_And Tommy’s mind had blanked, don’t think about a pink elephant-style, and he had blurted a suggestion to visit the park he’d once suggested taking Emily to, when she’d been fishing for a date. So that’s great._

Step, step, step. Tommy feels like a criminal walking to his trial. And in a way, he is; today is gonna be the last-ditch effort to prove that Emily is in fact _not_ Tommy’s soulmate, that he made the whole thing all up in his head, overthinking a weird interaction that happened when he was tired and stressed out. That Tommy has no biochemical excuse for the way he flirted with his best bud’s girlfriend. (Is that worse?) That Tommy – and Ronan – is just imagining his eyes darkening a shade, or maybe it’s an ageing thing, or maybe it _is_ a philomonal change, but someone _else_ is his actual soulmate. Maybe his reaction on that movie night was from residual Hanna-philomones hanging around in her home, and his body got confused and transferred its reaction to Emily just because she was there?

Hanna couldn’t come today, so Tommy won’t be testing that specific hypothesis. But it’s not like he has much faith in it anyway. He doesn’t know, though, if it’s a good thing or not that it’ll just be him and Jon and Emily. Would Hanna have been a helpful extra buffer between him and Emily, or would it just be awkward and make it obvious to everyone that Tommy’s interest has shifted?

Tommy is halfway across the bridge now – step, step, step – and more people over on the island side are coming into view. Half involuntarily, he starts scanning the tiny crowd for a familiar head of long, blonde hair.

Ah, there she is, standing out against the lush vegetation, Jon beside her. She’s wearing a summer dress with huge, colorful flowers all over it. The fabric hangs from a metal chain around her neck, baring her cleavage. It’s a bit silly. She looks _great_ in it. Tommy wants to rush over and sweep her into his arms, or jump over the bridge railing into the water, swim all the way to Iceland and his hypothetical goose farm.

As if she could feel Tommy’s gaze on her – or, yikes, maybe smell him? – Emily looks up. When she catches Tommy’s eye, she jumps up and down once, waving. Tommy raises a clammy hand to wave back, more self-conscious than he’s ever been in his _life_ , and then looks at Favs instead until he reaches them. He hopes it seems natural.

“Hey, man, nice choice,” Favs says by way of greeting, slapping Tommy’s back and then swinging his arm in a wide gesture to encompass the whole island. “I forgot how great this place is.”

Tommy just hums confusedly in response. Already tense, he steels himself for the Emily hug that will be coming next.

“Yeah, it’s _lovely_! I’ve always wanted to go here!” Emily exclaims, beaming at Tommy, before throwing her arms around him.

The hairs on Tommy’s arms stand up as he gives Emily as quick a squeeze as he can get away with. _She’s always wanted to go here?_ Was that a reference to their text convo, or…?

“So, what do you guys want to do?” Jon asks, picking up his backpack from the ground. “Should we start off with the picnic at the memorial?”

Tommy isn’t hungry. Tommy never wants to eat again. But somehow he manages to force down enough baguette and rotisserie chicken and interject enough active listening noises into Jon and Emily’s lively discussion (of what? fuck if Tommy knows) to not draw attention to his inner turmoil.

Lined up on the ledge of the semi-moat that encircles the memorial square – Tommy, Emily, Favs – Tommy dangles his feet into the water and stares unseeingly out at the surroundings. It’s beautiful here, Tommy knows intellectually that it is, but right now the trees and bushes are just scenery to rest his eyes on to avoid ogling Emily.

Tommy has stretched the space between him and Emily as far as he thinks he can get away with, but they’re still without a doubt within entanglement distance. Is anything happening right now between them, on a biochemical level? Are their philomones dancing through the air, tying the two of them closer together with every exchange, slowly but surely changing them on a molecular level? How much would the process speed up if Tommy licked at Emily’s sun warm skin, sweeping salty sweat full of philomones onto his tongue? _Jesus, dude. Get a hold of yourself!_

“So then the Senator said… Hey, Tommy, are you even listening?” Emily’s voice breaks through Tommy’s sleazy reveries.

“Weird thing for Senator Brown to say,” Favs interjects, with a honking laugh.

Tommy shakes himself, blushing (of course he’s blushing – he can’t even muster the energy to be annoyed by it).

“Sorry. I need to move, I think. Did you guys pick out a trail…?”

Favs shakes his head.

“No, but do you know what we should do?” Emily says, excited. Tommy can’t help glancing over at her, her eyes crinkled up and her cheeks rounding into a pair of Pink Lady apples. “We should rent a boat!”

“I thought Judge Black disapproved of you going to sea with strange men,” Tommy blurts, surprise untying his tongue.

Emily laughs. “You’re not strange men, you’re my boys!” she exclaims, pulling Jon and Tommy towards her in a sitting hug. Tommy tilts over, momentarily at risk of falling into the semi-moat, and before he can stop it he’s pressed in close, his nose in Emily’s hair. He _could_ lick her skin now, if he wanted. And he wants, he _wants_ , this is heady, he wants to stay here forever, do this forever, move into Emily’s hair and _live_ here…

Tommy hardly even notices when Jon pulls free from the hug to rise to his feet; _he’s_ still entangled in Emily (in a more literal sense than usual) when there’s a noise almost-but-not-quite like a dog barking. Tommy and Emily both startle, breaking apart. Tommy looks around to find the source of the bark, and sees that a whole group of deer has wandered onto the memorial plaza, long-legged and elegantly cautious. A hushed silence only just has time to fall over the people around the rounded square… before Jon breaks out laughing.

The deer startle, but Jon quickly silences himself, and they cut off their retreat at the tree line, before slowly edging back into the open air.

“Sorry,” Jon whispers to Tommy and Emily, as he slowly and quietly sits down again. “You just looked so funny, you moved exactly in sync when you looked around for the deer and then you made, like, exactly the same face when you found them.”

Emily stifles a giggle of her own and whispers, “Yeah, we actually practiced that for ages. Right, Tom?”

Tommy doesn’t answer (again), he’s too busy having his blood run cold. Movements syncing up is a sign that the process is advancing from Stage 1 to Stage 2. _Fuck, fuck, fuck_.

\---

When Favs and Emily want to end the night at a bar after all, Tommy fakes exhaustion from their hike – there wasn’t any place to rent a boat on the island, thank god – and goes home to lie in his bed and replay Emily-memories from the day.

_Like when Jon had come up to curl his arm around Emily’s waist as they trudged along on the Swamp Trail boardwalk, and Tommy had fallen back to leave room for the two of them to walk abreast. But he’d only had time to mutter a quick “Know your role” under his breath before Emily had turned around and waved him back up again._

“Where’d you go, Tommy?” she’d asked. “There’s plenty of room for you too. I need your press sec advice on how to explain the Senator’s trade agreement proposal to reporters, Jon just tells me to go on and on about hope and change and ‘Yes we can give back trade agreement oversight to Congress!’”

 _Tommy had reluctantly picked up his pace to join them, and mumbled something that he’s far from sure would count as stellar advice. Emily had smelled really good, though, he’s sure of_ that _._

When Tommy finally falls asleep, he dreams of taking Emily out on the water after all. Rather than in some petite Potomac powerboat he does it in his childhood yawl, and in the dream Tommy’s dad is there, alive and utterly charmed by Emily’s stories of her repeated Optimist capsizings in Biddeford Pool. Once Tommy has showed off his sailing skills to everybody’s satisfaction, the three of them get home (to a summer house that Tommy has never actually lived in) just in time for dinner. Apparently Tommy’s parents are still together in the dream, because it’s his mom who waits for them with her famous clam chowder. They stuff themselves, and then Tommy suggests a walk along the shoreline before bed, “just me and Em.” They walk out on a pier cobbled together from several real life inspirations, Emily’s hair blowing in the wind, her scent heavy around them, her smile filling his vision. It’s a little chilly, so Tommy sticks a hand in his pocket… and feels a ring box.

Tommy jerks awake, fingers gripping around nothing. After a moment of disoriented panting, cold sweat prickling across his chest, he rubs his hands across his face, and – what the hell is _that_?

Gingerly, Tommy draws a finger up and down the ridge of his nose what has to be at least fifty times, his heart drumming in his chest. That bump was _not_ there yesterday. It’s just the tiniest difference – Tommy stumbles up and out of his room, finds his way to the bathroom in the dark, and when he turns on the light he’s met by a pair of widened, slightly-too-brown eyes staring wildly at him from the mirror, but his nose _looks_ just the same.

It won’t stay that way for long, though. And Emily’s nose is super cute, it really is, but Tommy likes _his_ nose the way it is, likes his face the way it is. (Likes the fact that it still isn’t utterly and completely obvious to everyone around him that he’s met his soulmate.)

Tommy _has_ to talk to Jon and Emily.

\---

A few days later, Tommy finds himself lying awake in bed again, but this time, the circumstances are _very_ different. If he looks over to his right, he’ll meet Favs’ eyes, and this time it’ll definitely be even more awkward than it was the first eight times. The awkwardness seems to be on some sort of exponential curve. Tommy should ask Lovett about the math for it some day. No, he should not. He should _sleep_. He still has to go to work tomorrow and be sharp enough to follow along with the developments in the lead-up to the Libyan elections and the ongoing troubles in Mali and the discussions about easing sanctions on Burma and whatever else expected and unexpected matters the National Security Council will have to deal with.

In another most-likely-futile attempt at falling asleep, Tommy shuts his eyes and rolls over onto his stomach. It’s an effort to do so; his body is heavy and stolid from the sleeping pill he took two hours ago. He tries to modulate his breathing to be in time with Emily’s soft snoring; she’s somehow soundly asleep in the middle of the bed, without a care in the world. She has been asleep for long enough that she has cooled down by now, but when she first fell asleep, Tommy had been able to feel the sleep heat radiating off her. The intimacy of it had made his heart hurt. Inexplicably, it had felt even more intimate than seeing her in her scarce sleep clothes, terry cloth short-shorts and a silvery-silky nothing of a camisole; on the advice of the hotline people (who Tommy finally called earlier today, before having The Most Awkward Conversation with Jon and Emily) both she and Tommy are wearing as little as possible. Tommy himself is just in his boxers, which doesn’t make him feel any less vulnerable in this weird, weird situation.

To face the entanglement process head-on, Tommy, Jon and Emily have agreed to live together for at least a month, in Favs’ fancy digs in the Chastleton Cooperative, because Favs is the only one of them who doesn’t have any roommates. And on the recommendation of the Covalence Counselors, Tommy and Emily are to wear as little clothing as possible at all times. The more bared skin, the quicker the bonding (especially as they obviously won’t be having sex with each other, which is the one thing that would really speed up the process _considerably_ ), and they need to get this over with as soon as possible. They all have incumbents to help re-elect this fall.

It’s bonding or bust, now. “If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work,” Favs had said, shockingly blasé, when Tommy had laid out the possibility of a platonic bonding attempt to him and Emily, armed with a script from the Soulmate Matters Hotline. Tommy had been too grateful that they were willing to do this at all to say anything about that, then, but he doesn’t even want to contemplate what life will be like “if it doesn’t work.” If Tommy’s never able to be near Emily again, then he and Jon won’t quit the White House together next year, won’t move to LA and write that TV show about a presidential campaign that they’ve already started to plan out over late night bottles of wine. Maybe Tommy will just stay in Washington, then, become a lifer. Give his life to the government like a monk living in eternal penance, where nothing he does will ever be able to repent the original sin of letting his closest friendship get fucked up beyond all repair, of doing his very best to ruin the life of two of the people most important to him.

Tommy sighs. With thoughts like that spinning through his head, he will never be able to sleep. He rolls over to his back again, which prompts Emily to shift in her sleep, too. She inches closer, and it takes every ounce of will in Tommy’s body not to reach out and pull her closer. He wonders if Favs is still awake. He doesn’t check. Instead, he tries to concentrate on whether he can feel it happening, the exchange of synergistic oxytocin kicking in, the complete transition over into Phase 2, into actual bonding. He can’t. This just feels like lying awake, staring at the ceiling.

After a few minutes, Emily rolls away again. She nuzzles close to Favs instead, gives a contented hum in her sleep. Tommy feels the loss acutely. It’s like if someone had taken away his favorite teddy bear when he was sleeping in a strange new place as a child. Or like someone had sawed off one of his limbs. Something roars in Tommy’s chest, wants to rip its way out and fight Favs for dominance then and there. Tommy rolls over on his stomach again.

Somehow, Tommy must have eventually fallen asleep, because the next thing he knows, he’s waking up under Emily’s nowadays greenish gaze. The bedclothes rustle as Tommy untwists himself from them, and Emily glances down at his bare chest. When she looks back up, their eyes meet again. For a moment, it’s electric, just like that evening on the couch that started it all. For a moment, Tommy thinks he, or maybe even Emily, is going to reach over, and Favs or no Favs, something is going to happen. Then Emily starts giggling.

It’s a contagious laugh, impossible to resist. Tommy starts to giggle too, even though he doesn’t know what it is that is so funny. And then it’s impossible to stop. He and Emily do their best to stay quiet, gulping for air, but their laughter shakes the bed enough to wake poor Jon too. Soon all three of them laughing until they can’t breathe, until they’re all too hungry to stay in bed. They tumble out into Favs’ kitchen, and Favs makes them all tea while Emily fries them eggs and Tommy butters toast. It’s almost unbearably domestic.

“We forgot milk,” Emily says, once they’re all seated at the table.

Immediately, Jon and Tommy are both on their feet again, reaching for the refrigerator door.

Emily laughs. “I could get used to this,” she jokes.

Tommy freezes, glances over at Favs before he can stop himself. _Shit, this is gonna make him throw me out, it has to, it’s too much._ But Jon just gazes down at his girlfriend adoringly, and when he sees Tommy looking, he transfers the smile to him. Then he gets the milk.

\---

It goes on like that for more than a week: the three of them eat meals together, play games and watch movies together, and just generally hang out. The nights are still torture, but the mornings and evenings are great. Tommy loves it, much more than he’d thought he would. He likes living with Keenan and O’Neill well enough, but this is different. He and Jon and Emily are not just sharing a living space; the whole _point_ is for them to spend as much time together as possible. It’s nice.

And if Tommy ever finds himself wanting _more_ , he just has to think about Emily’s taken-aback _“What? No!”_ when they had their Most Awkward Conversation, and Tommy had asked if she had noticed anything changing in their dynamic recently. _Blushing and stammering, Tommy had told her and Jon about how he’d found himself suddenly attracted to her. Emily had blushed too, the way she does nowadays, but then she’d said, “No, for me it didn’t… that is, I’m not – I mean, for me, there hasn’t been any change.”_ So clearly, other than the purely biochemical aspects, any ‘charge’ between them had been all in Tommy’s head. It’s a relief, frankly, to know that Emily isn’t really interested in him, soulmates or no. Tommy blew his chances last summer, and now he can enjoy this for what it is without having to wallow in ‘what if’s.

One evening, Favs offhandedly mentions the jam sessions they used to have at the Pad, and Emily seizes on it like a hawk. She has Jon wrestle his electric keyboard out from where it’s been languishing in a closet. She then has Tommy take out his guitar, which he brought with him on a whim when he quickly packed for this ridiculous adventure in soul-bonding. With both of “her boys” ready to jam, Emily forces them to accompany her as she sings through all of Taylor Swift’s discography. At least that’s what it feels like, Tommy’s fingers growing numb with it. It’s the best. Emily’s voice is lovely.

Another night they take pity on Hanna, lonely in her and Emily’s apartment, and have her come over for another of their already traditional movie nights. Before she arrives, Tommy worries that it’ll be awkward, but it turns out fine. Now that everyone knows where they stand, they can just relax and have fun. They watch Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (picked by Tommy because it feels safe enough for a potentially fraught relational situation), and they end up taking turns imitating different characters. Hanna’s White Queen wins – the precision with which she mimics Anne Hathaway’s movement patterns is impressive to the point of being uncanny – but everybody gets a participation donut. When Hanna leaves, Tommy’s full and content enough to actually fall asleep within an hour of falling into Jon’s overly soft bed.

In short, everything is going according to plan. It seems like Tommy and Emily will, in fact, get to enjoy the enhanced immune defence and on-average longer life-span that comes with a bonded existence. Neither Tommy nor Emily has noticed any new physical changes for days, now, which _should_ mean that they’ve moved on to the last phase of the entanglement process, and, miraculously, they’ve done so completely without incident. As the days pass, Tommy slowly starts to think that this might actually work out. Lets himself get lulled into a false sense of security.

Except it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a maddening tease to aaaaaalmost but not quite get what he wants – what his body wants – no, fuck, who is he kidding, what _he_ wants. He gets to sit next to Emily on Jon’s beige sofa when they watch a movie, he even gets to sometimes put his arm around her – physical touch is a bonding accelerator – but he doesn’t get to kiss her. Doesn’t get to explore her body from head to toe, doesn’t get to taste her, doesn’t get to discover the different ways their bodies could fit together. And the impulse is always there, pulling at his innards, as he gets used to coming home to her smell, to getting to breathe her every day. But it’s manageable. Sometimes it even fades enough into the background that Tommy can forget all about it for a short moment, and then it’s just him, Em and Jon, hanging out. Sharing space. Sharing life.

And really, if Tommy’s being honest, that’s almost worse. Tommy keeps flashing back to his life with Katie: another time he let himself think he was going to have something forever, only to have it ripped out of his grasping hands. Not that Tommy really thinks he will get to keep _this_ forever. Intellectually, he knows that this domesticity is manufactured, that it’s only temporary, but convincing his body is a different matter. _Home_ , it says, as Emily hands him a plate to dry after she’s washed it, as he hands it on to Jon to put it into its proper place in the cupboard. _Safe_ , Tommy’s body says. _Love_.

\---

Tommy, Em and Favs have all cancelled most of their plans for the foreseeable future. Jon bounces around the country with POTUS some, but he always returns the same day. “I’ll be your ‘chaperone’,” he had joked during their Talk, putting on a brave face about the situation, and this far he has been there with them every night. But then there’s a crisis at the Campaign HQ in Chicago, and on the logic of ‘if you can’t get POTUS himself, get his mind-reader,’ Axe borrows Jon for the weekend. And so, Tommy and Emily are left to spend their first ever night alone together.

The night starts out fine; Tommy averts his eyes as Emily changes into her sleepwear (though he might as well not, with how much of her nipples are visible through her assortment of camisoles – today she’s wearing a pink one), and then they climb into bed. It’s a lot less crowded without Jon in it with them, and Tommy takes care to keep his distance a little. They’re supposed to stay close, but one night with a little extra bed between them can hardly hurt. Rolled over onto his stomach, with his feet hanging out over the edge of the bed in a way that Em and Favs have taken to gently mocking him for, Tommy falls asleep without problem. It’s been a few days since he had a hard time falling asleep, actually; now he slips into a slumber with more ease than he sometimes does at home, even.

Tommy sleeps soundly until morning, and he’s not even fully awake when he rolls over to his side and stretches out his legs. His stirring rouses Emily to make a half-awake movement of her own; her hand comes groping towards him, and when it reaches his waist it begins to pull at him. Early morning cuddles have happened before, so Tommy goes along with it, at first. Then, he notices his severe case of morning wood. He stops dead, lets himself grow heavy against the mattress so that Emily can’t budge him.

Emily tugs on his waist twice more before making a disgruntled sleepy noise and giving up. Tommy breathes a mental sigh of relief, but then she reverses tack and scoots _herself_ over instead. For a blissful second her almost-naked body is warm and soft against Tommy’s, a bony knee pressing in between his thighs, and then –

Tommy jolts backwards, right to the edge of the bed, but Emily has already felt his erection. He can see it in her eyes, startled by his movement, but widening already before, pupils huge and black.

Tommy should leave, make a tactical retreat to the bathroom, make breakfast pancakes and pretend this never happened. But he’s pinned in place by Emily’s eyes. They have little flecks of gold in them that he’s never noticed before, but they don’t come from him. Maybe it’s just the morning light? In any case, he can’t look away, let alone _move_ away.

Tommy’s mind is still a bit sleep-blurry, and as he lies at the edge of the bed, clenching his abs not to fall off, time seems to stretch out like the bed stretches out between him and Emily. The two of them are floating, suspended in an unbearable now, neither of them moving, balancing on the precipice of a something that happened and a something that yet might happen. Like in a moment they might be frantically kissing, or ripping off each others clothes. But when someone finally moves, it’s not like that at all.

After god knows how long, Emily takes a deep breath, and then she’s reaching out towards Tommy again, a hand slowly bridging the gulf between them until her gentle fingertips make contact with Tommy’s forehead. Instantly, all of Tommy’s awareness focuses in on the small points of skin-to-skin contact. It feels like they’re touching for the first time, _really_ touching. Then Emily draws a finger down his nose, in an excruciatingly slow movement. When she feels the slight bump in the bone that’s the result of their synergistic entanglement she _gasps_ , a soft little sound that Tommy wants to swallow up and keep in his chest forever.

As she gasps, Emily’s hand slides down so she instead has two fingers pressed against Tommy’s lips. Her gaze follows her hand down to Tommy’s mouth, and before he knows it Tommy is following suit, glancing down at her kissably pink lips.

 _What the hell is going on?_ Emily said she hadn’t felt any sudden pull towards Tommy, she _said_. So why is her mouth parting just the tiniest bit, now, her tongue darting out to lick her bottom lip? Why is she leaning in towards Tommy, eyes closed, and taking a deep breath, like she’s inhaling him? Why are her fingertips slowly, slowly pressing harder at Tommy’s mouth, like she’s trying to press them in between his lips?

Tommy has to stop this, whatever it is, in its tracks. He reaches up and grabs Emily’s hand, pulls it away from his face, slightly, but then he can’t help himself; he pulls her hand in closer again, kisses her knuckles. It’s just the quickest brush of his lips against her skin, but it feels like _everything_ , like a promise. Emily seems to think so too; her eyes flutter closed, and she moans a soft, almost inaudible moan that goes straight to Tommy’s dick, almost forgotten until now, hardening it impossibly more.

And then, without Tommy knowing quite how it happens, they’re kissing, their lips making contact for the first time, the softest press that feels so _right_ , so perfect. It’s the best kiss of Tommy’s life, the fulfillment of the promise the brush of his lips against Emily’s knuckles had made, and they’re not even using tongue yet. Now it’s Tommy’s turn to moan, and when he does, Emily presses her whole lithe little body against his.

Emily’s nipples are two hard points rubbing against Tommy’s torso through the silk of her camisole. Her shorts are soaked through, spreading her wetness on his thigh as she grinds her cunt down against him. _Jesus._ He can smell it, too, her wetness, the smell he knows as _Emily_ , but ten thousand times over, overpowering, intoxicating, _necessary_.

Somehow, it’s the knowledge that he never again wants to live in a world where he doesn’t get to smell this, doesn’t get to _feel_ this, that spurs Tommy to actually stop this. Gently, he puts his hands on Emily’s shoulders, pushes her away even as every fibre of his being wants to pull her closer. Then, with Emily looking on in quixotic silence, Tommy stumbles through Jon’s half-dark bedroom to the chair where he put yesterday’s clothes.

\---

There’s a thunderstorm roaring in Tommy’s head all through the cab ride through early morning Washington, from Chastleton to 1309. No one seems to be awake back home, so Tommy beelines to the bathroom and gets right into the shower.

Under the icy spray Tommy jerks off furiously, tugging at himself as he thinks of thunderstorms, of roaring waves, of unforgiving nature raining apocalypse down in earthquakes and tornadoes. He doesn’t think of Emily’s soft pink lips and clever tongue, her hazel-green doe eyes, her intoxicating smell. He doesn’t think about her fingertips on his skin, or how she calls Tommy and Jon “her boys.”

After Tommy comes, spurting hard against the shower wall, knees buckling, he gets right to scrubbing his skin raw to try to get rid of that _Emily_ smell, get rid of any philomones lingering on his skin. Once he’s satisfied with his work, smarting all over, he sits down on the cold tile, head between his legs. For a moment he thinks he’s gonna puke, like he did when he first… but then he cries instead. He’s still crying when a concerned Mike knocks on the bathroom door with a, “Tommy, is that you? What’s going on?”

\---

On Monday, Tommy calls in sick. He _is_ sick, already, the separation from Emily making itself known in an ache behind his eyes, a queasiness when he tries to eat, a heightened body temperature just on the verge of being a fever. It’s far from enough to get Tommy to stay home under normal circumstances, but, well… He’s not ready to face Favs, not yet. (He fears he might never be.) And Tommy’s gonna get much worse before he gets better, anyway, so he might as well stay home in anticipation of having to leave for the hospital. The hotline people insisted he should have an emergency bag packed.

“It fell through,” Tommy explains into his Blackberry, his voice quivering.

Donilon is sympathetic, and Tommy bites his tongue against insisting that he’s a cowardly quitter who deserves what’s coming for him. His boss has enough to deal with without being a repository for Tommy’s self-hate.

\---

For two days, Tommy putters around 1309 through the work day, and then hides in his room when Mike and Cody get home. Tommy doesn’t want worried looks and pointed questions. He wants to feel bad for himself in peace.

Tommy feels bad physically, too, has this constant, low-level headache, but it’s mild enough that he can mostly pretend it isn’t there. He has to put more work, frankly, into ignoring all the incessant phone calls from Emily and Favs. And from Lovett, who joins in the barrage on the second day, calling with increasing frequency. As if he has any business meddling in Tommy’s private matters.

_“Look, it does things to you, the process,” Lovett had said, back when Tommy had first told him about his suspicions about himself and Emily. “It changes you, changes your priorities. I mean, Ronan is amazing, I love him, and I can’t even imagine not being synergistically bonded to him. But if he wasn’t my… I don’t think I could have done the whole long distance thing if it wasn’t for… you know.”_

Lovett had had to force the words out for the counterfactual, the thought of not having Ronan in his life clearly too abhorrent to even contemplate. Remembering it now, Tommy has to swallow against the bitterness rising up in his throat like bile. His life _is_ that counterfactual, now, and he’ll _never_ … Fuck. Fuck Lovett. Fuck _everything_.

\---

On Wednesday, things take a turn for the worse. Tommy can’t keep any food down, now, and his headache has spread throughout his skull. When he gets out of bed to go to the bathroom, the room swims, and even if he stays horizontal, a shot of pain will shoot through his abdomen every now and then.

_“How bad can it get?” Tommy had asked the hotline people when he called them on Sunday._

_“When it’s at its worst it’s like childbirth,” his hotline contact had told him. “Or a burst appendix.”_

Tommy isn’t quite _there_ , yet, but it’s probably time to start thinking about getting himself to that hospital.

The worst thing, though, is that Emily must be feeling just as bad. Fever rising, Tommy squashes down the guilt. He thinks, uncharitably, that if Emily wants to feel better, she can just come here. She can leave Favs, if she wants to be with Tommy so much. _She’s_ been the one initiating contact every time that they’ve come close to going too far, even though she said she wasn’t interested! _Tommy_ is the responsible one. _He’s_ the one suffering unfairly.

Another cramp seizes Tommy, and he curls into a fetal position and thinks of nothing but pain for a while.

\---

 _Something_ sears painfully through Tommy’s head, an unspecified amount of time later, and it takes him a moment to realize that it’s the sound of the doorbell, and not just his headache flaring up.

 _‘It’s Emily,’_ Tommy thinks, with delirious optimism. But as he forces himself out of bed, he less deliriously thinks that it’s probably Ronny Jackson, the White House doctor, who has promised to check in on Tommy when he has the time.

It’s neither Emily nor Rear Admiral Jackson, it turns out, when Tommy finally manages to make his way to the front door. It’s Favs. Tommy’s heart sinks.

If Tommy hadn’t already been running a temperature of 102°F, he’s pretty sure he would be flushing hot all over at the sight of his best friend. “Hey, dude,” he manages, weakly.

Tommy can _see_ Favs stopping himself from rolling his eyes. “Hello,” Favs replies instead, through gritted teeth. “Can I come in?”

Tommy steps aside, swaying slightly, and Favs shoots him a worried look, seemingly despite himself.

Once they’re both inside, standing uncomfortably close in the 1309 hallway/living room, Tommy’s struck by how much Jon smells of Emily, that flower-fresh-and-yet-musky scent that goes straight to the most untamed parts of Tommy. In his weakened state, Tommy breathes that smell in and just _reacts_. He gets his hands on Jon, pushes him against the wall, the air rushing out of Jon in a little ‘oof.’

For a moment, things are dizzy. Tommy’s instincts are yelling _closer, kiss, lick, breathe, touch_ , but this isn’t Emily, it’s just her scent. Tommy shuts his eyes, holding his breath, tries to force himself into rationality. When he opens his eyes again, Jon is staring at him with wide eyes, his body tensed, ready to fight. But when he realizes that Tommy won’t do anything, the tension leaves his body. He leans his head back a little, baring his throat, coarse with overnight stubble, Adam’s apple bobbing as he breathes, as he swallows.

“Jesus, dude,” he says, lowering his eyes from the ceiling to Tommy’s face. “What the fuck?”

“I’m sorry, you just… you smell like – uh, I can’t. Shit.” Tommy tries to shake his head clear.

Favs grabs Tommy’s shoulders, pushes him away. When he lets Tommy go, Tommy sways again, so Jon gets his hands on his arms, guides him onto one of Lovett’s old couches, sits down beside him.

“So, what’s the plan, then, Tom?” he asks.

Tommy snorts a harsh laugh, more a ‘fuck you’ than a sign of amusement.

Now, Jon actually rolls his eyes. “Yeah, clearly you have one. Because you’re not sticking to the one _we_ made, or you wouldn’t have _left us_! So I want to hear what it is, so I can decide if it’s worth Emily puking her guts out.”

Tommy looks at him uncomprehendingly. “‘If it doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t work out’,” he quotes their agreement. “Well, it didn’t work out. So I left.” Tommy crosses his arms over his chest, physically holding himself together.

“‘If it doesn’t…’! You fucking bastard! Is _that_ what you got from that?” Jon stands up, barely containing his outrage.

“Uh, yeah?” Tommy shoots back, confused but echoing Favs’ heated tone. “What _should_ I have taken from that?”

“I, uh,” Favs hedges, sinking back onto the couch. “Well, not that you should run off in a huff and refuse to even talk to us, that’s for sure! If you don’t want to let things get physical, or whatever, that’s fine! And if you want to make _yourself_ sick, that’s fine too. Be my fucking guest! But you’re making Emily sick too, and that’s _not_ fine! This whole thing was _your_ fucking idea; you can’t just pull out halfway!”

Jon blushes at his accidental double entendre, but Tommy’s too incensed to even really notice it. “Oh, come on, man!” he yells, spreading his arms with enough force to make himself dizzy. “Are you trying to guilt trip me about _not fucking_ your girlfriend!?”

“Yeah, maybe I am!” Favs screams back, flinging his own arms out just as wide.

For a moment just glare at each other from opposite ends of the couch, arms spread out like they’re playing at being airplanes. Then the ridiculousness of their fight catches up with them. Jon breaks first, starts to giggle with his tongue pushed out beneath gap teeth, but Tommy soon follows suit. Soon they’re guffawing maniacally, tilting over against the backrest, unable to stop, one explosive release of tension.

“What’s _your_ idea, then?” Tommy asks at last, through exhausted pants and aftershock chuckles.

Jon looks at him softly, and when he speaks, his voice is just as soft. “Come home, Tom.”


	2. Epilogue

Emily smiles weakly at Tommy from under the covers, when he and Jon enter the bedroom. The air in Jon’s bedroom is stuffy with the heaviness of illness, but also filled to the brim with the scent that has come to feel as necessary as oxygen, to Tommy. He breathes it in, frozen on the spot, held up only by Jon’s steadying arm. Now that the thing Tommy’s held himself back from for so long is within his reach, he can’t make himself reach for it.

“You came,” Emily says, simply. She somehow manages to sound at the same time pleasantly surprised _and_ as if she never had a doubt that Tommy would come back, in the end.

“I did,” Tommy says. He notices that his voice is going all gooey and soft, and it’s a joy to let himself just… lean into it. “I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier.”

Jon helps Tommy into bed, just as he helped him from the car to the elevator, from the elevator into the apartment. The bed is warm, and once he’s in it, it’s impossible not to press close to Emily. As Tommy noses into the hinge of Emily’s jaw, unconsciously drawn to one of her philomone glands, Emily strokes his sweat-damp hair away from his forehead. Her hand is as fever-hot as Tommy is, but it still feels like a cooling balm for Tommy’s throbbing head.

“Hey there,” Emily says, nonsensically, her voice like honeyed tea for a sore throat.

Tommy leans back enough to catch her gaze. “Hi.”

They share a smile, drowning in each others’ eyes, shiny with illness and emotion. It’s all very ‘Melodramatic. Lovey-dovey. _Soulmates_. Ridiculous!’, to quote Lovett. Then Emily extricates her hand from Tommy’s hair, and draws a finger down to the tip of his nose.

Tommy’s heart doubles its pace. “Emily,” he breathes, his eyes flickering down to Emily’s open mouth.

At the foot of the bed, Jon clears his throat.

“Do you, uh… do you need anything? Another blanket? A glass of water?” he asks, hovering awkwardly.

Emily looks from Jon, to Tommy, then back to Jon.

“Nah,” she says. “But come join, if you want!” She pats the bed beside her.

Tommy doesn’t have time to figure out how he feels about that before Jon laughs and says, “Nope! You’re both _gross_. I’m gonna go find a Starbucks and finally get some work done on the speech I should have finished yesterday, now that I don’t have to worry about my two favorite people dying of idiocy!”

\---

For half an hour or so after Favs leaves, Tommy and Emily just shiver against each other, nose to nose, breathing each other’s presence and sweating out their fevers.

Tommy remembers how magically fast Lovett and Ronan got better from _their_ separation sickness once they were in the same hospital room together – from halfway to death’s door to released home in the course of a few hours – but he still manages to be surprised by how quickly he starts to feel better.

Once he feels almost back to normal, he rolls back a fraction, studies Emily’s face. Her eyes are less shiny now, her skin back to its normal color. On an impulse, Tommy slowly draws _his_ finger down _her_ nose. Emily explodes into a grin as he does, and when he reaches the tip of her nose, she nips at his finger playfully.

It’s so lovely, so right. And Tommy knows that Jon tactfully bowed out to give him and Emily the chance to do exactly this, but he still feels guilty. He doubts he’ll ever not feel guilty about this.

“Hey, what is it?” Emily asks, a tiny wrinkle between her eyebrows, so in tune with Tommy that she knows that he’s lost the thread, if only for a second.

Tommy catches her eye again. “I wasn’t planning for –” he gesticulates between the two of them “– for, you know, _this_ when I first brought the soulmate thing up with you and Jon. You know that, right?” It feels paramount that she understands this, that she knows that this wasn’t all a manipulative ploy to get in her pants, or whatever.

Emily looks like she gets it, nodding solemnly, but then she breaks out into a mischievous smile. “Mmm… but were you _hoping_ for it?” she asks impishly.

“No! Em!”

Emily grows serious again. “I was,” she confesses. “Remember when we talked, and you asked if I had noticed something changing between us recently?” she goes on, and Tommy senses that it’s paramount that _he_ gets what she’s trying to say now. “And I said I hadn’t – and that was true. Because… because for me, that… well, that ‘initial attraction’ never really went away. But you weren’t interested, and then I met Jon, and he wanted me back, and I thought I would get over you – hoped I would, anyway – but I didn’t get to rediscover wanting you, because I just… always did. And I thought that you would understand, when I said it like that, because you always understand what I mean, but then you didn’t, and you said you wanted it to be platonic, and it was easier to just go with that. But I’ve _always_ wanted… this. Us.”

So of course Tommy has to kiss her, then. They kiss with tongue, this time, and it’s a kiss to get lost in. With his eyes closed and Emily’s scent all around him, Tommy feels like he could drown in the sensations. Emily’s hands are in his hair again, pulling lightly, testing it out scratching his scalp. Tommy groans appreciatively, and she pulls a little harder, nibbles at his lip as it slides between her teeth. And then her thigh is between his legs again, moving up just like it did four days ago, but with intent, this time. Her leg rubs against Tommy’s cock through his sweatpants, her other leg wrapped around his hip, and it’s impossibly intense. Tommy fucking keens at it, and Emily giggles breathlessly.

Tommy rolls onto his back, pulling Emily on top of him, and slides his hands down her back, grabs at her buttocks, nails digging into her skin through her pajama bottoms. When he lets her go, Emily gets up on her knees and wiggles out of her pajama pants. She’s wearing nothing underneath.

Emily looks Tommy straight in the eye as she grabs for one of his hands, and pushes it between her legs. Tommy’s fingers slide over a mound of curly, blonde hair that he wants to explore further some day, and then they’re on her pussy. And Tommy means to do what Em clearly wants him to do, but when he feels her wetness, he has to taste her, _now_. He pulls his fingers back, flicking them over her clit, and lifts them to his own mouth.

As Tommy licks his fingers clean, rejoicing in the salty sweetness of the pure essence of her body, Emily groans, grinding down on his thigh.

“Okay,” she says, clearly forcing herself to remember how to do words. “Okay, this is… really nice… but Jon’s right. We _are_ pretty gross,” she points out. “Let’s take this to the shower.”

\---

When Jon returns, bearing three iced lattes, he finds Tommy and Emily entwined on the sofa, clean and hale and satisfied.

Emily accepts her iced latte with a grateful smile and a kiss, pulling Jon down onto the sofa until she sits pressed between him and Tommy, her arms around ‘her boys.’

“I could get used to this,” he jokes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so very much to my lovely beta, [SelfRescuingPrincess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SelfRescuingPrincess/), who not only gave great general comments, helped me pick out a title, and caught my overuse of the word "creepy," but also, as always, supplied that special extra something that elevates a story to the next level - this time, she made the science jargon sound like actual science jargon. You're the best!
> 
> And lastly, now that reveals have been revealed, I can finally tell you to visit my [podsa tumblr](https://abriefshoutouttosomeminutiae.tumblr.com/), where I post very irregularly.


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